Research Article Open Access

Abstract

In this work we performed a series of nanoindentation test on nanocrystalline (nc) tungsten (W) specimens, using Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations and Embedded Atom Method (EAM). We studied the grain size effect in the range of 6 to 15 nm, with a penetration rate of 5 Å/ps and at room temperature 300 K. We found an increase in reduced elastic modulus Er and the Young elastic modulus E with the increase in grain size. On the other hand, we investigated the effect of the penetration velocity ranging from 3 Å/ps to 5 Å/ps. We found that the elastic modulus increases when the rate of penetration increases. The found results are in good agreement with the literature